Outside, one of the men shouted:
“She isn’t yours to hide!”
The mountain man’s eyes hardened.
The woman’s face flushed with anger.
“Apparently everyone in these mountains thinks I belong to someone.”
The mountain man turned toward her immediately.
“No.”
His answer came harder than anything else he had said.
“You don’t.”
The woman looked at him.
The man outside shouted again.
“She carries papers that don’t belong to her!”
The woman’s hand moved instinctively toward the pocket of her discarded dress.
The mountain man noticed.
“What papers?”
She hesitated.
Before leaving Baltimore, an attorney had given her an envelope.
Her father’s old lawyer had died the previous winter. His son had been sorting files when he found documents marked with her maiden name.
She had not understood most of them.
A survey.
A deed.
Several handwritten pages.
A map of Colorado.
She thought the papers might concern a forgotten parcel of worthless mountain land.
After losing nearly everything following her husband’s death, even a useless piece of property had seemed worth investigating.
So she traveled west.
She had told nobody except the stagecoach company and the attorney.
Yet the robbers had not asked for jewelry.
They had demanded her trunk.
Specifically.
One of them shouted:
“Give us the deed!”
That was when she understood they knew.
She had struck one attacker with a rock and run into the forest.
The envelope remained inside her dress.
She looked toward the wet garment hanging near the stove.
The mountain man followed her gaze.
“You have the deed.”
It was not a question.
She swallowed.
“I have something.”
He nodded once.
“That explains the stagecoach.”
“How?”
He lifted the signet ring.
“Your father owned more land than anyone in Baltimore knew.”
She stared.
“How much?”
The mountain man looked toward the floor beneath them.
“This spring is part of it.”
Silence.
Then:
“What?”
“Not the cabin.”
“The land.”
He pointed downward.
“The spring begins beneath the ridge and runs through four thousand acres your father purchased under another company name.”
The woman laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because impossible information often entered the mind disguised as absurdity.
“My father sold furniture.”
“He invested in mining claims.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“He barely had enough money when he died.”
“He wanted people to believe that.”
She stared at the ring.
“Why?”
The mountain man looked toward the door.
“Because men like the ones outside were already looking.”
One attacker slammed something heavy against the wooden frame.